Alan Friedman works full time as a greeting card designer but pursues his love of astronomy in the evenings from an observatory he has erected in his own backyard in Buffalo, New York. These brilliant photos are captured using a small telescope and Hydrogen Alpha filter which acts as a lens and streams images in the same way as a webcam would. Each photo is made out of thousands of frames of images that are then combined and adjusted in color and tonality to create a final high res photograph.

Robert Landsberg was filming Mount St. Helens in 1980 when the volcano erupted. When he realised that he was not going to escape the eruption, he placed his camera on his backpack and covered it with his body in order to protect it. When he was found 17 days later, the film was developed and the photos published in National Geographic.

FEI, a company that manufactures microscopes, regularly holds a macro photo contest in which entrants must submit pictures of things that cannot be seen without magnification. Here is a selection of a few of the entries into the competition for 2012.